proud, contemptuous disdain of her.
She remembered how Luke had walked into the sitting-room one day while she was there alone with Angelica, desperately trying to withstand the child’s very obvious desire for feminine affection. He had picked his daughter up, plainly recognising both the withdrawal and rejection in Jenneth’s refusal to touch his child, his mouth grim with dislike of her where once it had been soft with desire and love…or so she had thought. But that of course had just been an illusion.
She hadn’t realised how he had interpreted the twins’ adolescent teasing about the fact that she had very recently ended a brief relationship with one of her clients; nor that he had assumed quite wrongly from her brothers’ totally erroneous description of that relationship that she and Christopher Harding had been lovers, but the barbed comment he had made to her about the dullness of his aunt and uncle’s home without the presence of her lover to enliven it for her had been something she had seized gladly upon to bolster her shaky pride, smiling insincerely back at him as she said lightly, ‘It’s only for a week…’
And Luke had responded jeeringly, ‘And you can live quite easily without him in your bed for that length of time, is that it?’
And then, with a rush of anger she could only regret later, she had retaliated rashly—and thoroughly untruthfully—saying, ‘Christopher and I have been lovers for quite some time,’ and then from somewhere she had produced a feline smile, and added, ‘He goes away on business quite a lot, and when he does…’
‘You replace him in your bed with someone else,’ Luke had finished for her, totally misunderstanding what she had been about to say, which was that when Christopher was away she coped quite adequately without him. Before she could correct him, he had continued bitterly, ‘How you’ve changed. And to think that—’
He had stopped speaking as the twins came bursting into the room, and after that they had each studiously avoided the other, Luke taking good care to make sure his small daughter came nowhere near her.
She had told herself that she had been glad…glad that she had finally shown him that she was a woman and desirable to others, even if not to him…glad that she had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him or with his child…glad that she had finally and irrevocably broken away from the old Jenneth, who had adored him to the point of lunacy, who had loved him just as intensely…and who had gone on loving him long after he had made it plain that he most certainly did not love her.
And that had been the last time she had seen him.
CHAPTER TWO
AS THE date of Louise’s wedding drew closer, Jenneth found herself regretting more and more that she had agreed to go. It was not that she didn’t want to see her friend married and wish her and her new husband good luck; she did, and, had Louise chosen anywhere but Little Compton as the venue for her wedding, Jenneth knew that she would have been anticipating it with a glad heart, and more than a touch of delighted curiosity about the man who had so radically changed her old friend’s determined stance on the joys of the single state.
As it was, even with Louise’s reassurance that Luke would not be attending the wedding, she was increasingly conscious of the fact that there would be other people there who remembered her younger self, and her love for Luke; they would remember their engagement and Luke’s subsequent marriage to someone else; and then, in the manner of village people the world over, they would look at her ringless hands and speculate among themselves as to the reasons for her unmarried state.
Standing in her studio, she gave a tiny shudder of revulsion at the thought of their curiosity and pity, wishing that she had the courage to telephone Louise and tell her firmly that she could not attend the wedding. There were, after all, half a dozen genuine reasons she could conjure up for not attending, and one of them was in front of her now on her desk, she acknowledged ruefully, frowning over the preliminary sketches she had been asked to prepare for a large mural to cover the walls of the children’s ward in one of York’s large hospitals.
The commission had come to her via a client of hers, who had spearheaded a campaign to raise funds to support the specialised ward, which had been in danger of collapsing.
An exceedingly large donation from a millionaire local businessman had resulted not only in the ward being fully re-equipped with several vital pieces of advanced technology, but there had also been sufficient money left over for her ex-client, who was chairwoman of the fund-raising committee, to announce briskly that they could afford to do something about the almost institutionalised drabness of the ward’s emulsion-painted walls.
She had approached Jenneth, who had been delighted to accept the commission, which she had offered to do at much less than her normal rates, and in return she had virtually been given carte blanche with the design.
The problem now facing her was what to choose to catch the imagination and attention of children suffering so desperately, and of such very disparate ages.
Her lack of concentration in favour of worrying about the ordeal of Louise’s wedding didn’t help, and she was still frowning over the vague notes she had scribbled down when the studio door opened and Kit came in.
Jenneth watched him walking towards her with the familiar loping stride that both he and his twin had inherited from their father, her heart as always caught up in a wave of mingled love and apprehension…Love because they were both so very dear to her, and apprehension because guiding two exuberant and very high-spirited boys through their teenage years had not always been easy.
Their A levels now behind them, and the long summer holiday just begun, Jenneth realised anew with almost every day that passed that they were now virtually adult. Certainly both of them were emotionally mature and wellbalanced, something for which she modestly refused to take the credit, putting it down to the fact that their parents had provided them all with a stable and loving background during their early years.
Kit grinned at her as he advanced towards her and asked, ‘Any chance of borrowing your car? I’m playing tennis over at Chris Harding’s this afternoon, and Nick’s taken the Metro.’
The rather battered but roadworthy Metro that Jenneth had bought them as a joint eighteenth birthday present had done sterling service in the six months they had owned it, but, although they were twins, her brothers enjoyed different hobbies and had different sets of friends. So far she had ignored the broad hints she had been given about the necessity for another car. The hints had been good-humoured, both boys being well aware that, although their father’s insurance policies had provided a roof over their heads, and a small but steady income, any luxuries had to be paid for out of Jenneth’s commissions.
Since they were both sensible and very good drivers, she had no qualms about loaning them her own car when she wasn’t using it, but on this occasion she shook her head with genuine regret and explained, ‘I have to go in to York with some paintings for the gallery, and I promised Eleanor I’d do it this afternoon. I could drop you off on the way, if you like,’ she offered obligingly.
‘Only if you let me drive,’ Kit countered with a grin. It was a standing joke between them that Jenneth, inclined to daydream, especially when her work engrossed her, was sometimes rather an erratic driver. She blushed even now to recall the occasion on which she had been so deeply involved mentally in the mural she was working on that she had driven down the narrow lane that led from their house to the main road and straight into a ditch, necessitating an anxious call to their nearest neighbour, a local farmer, who obligingly came out with his tractor to haul her sturdy Volvo estate car back on to the lane.
Kit and Nick knew all about
